Super Bowl XXXVIII (which aired on February 1, 2004) was noted for a controversial halftime show produced by MTV, aired live on the CBS television network. At the time of Super Bowl XXXVIII, both MTV and CBS were owned by the media group Viacom, but as of January 2006 had been split into separate entities, with CBS as a self-owned company, and MTV as part of the Viacom group. It is said that one of the causes of the split was this controversy, especially after CBS renewed its NFL television contract.

"The Nipplegate Scandal"

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Singers Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake were performing a duet of Timberlake's song "Rock Your Body", which featured many suggestive dance moves by both Timberlake and Jackson. As the song reached the final line, "I'm gonna have you naked by the end of this song", Timberlake pulled off a part of Jackson's costume, revealing her right breast (adorned with a large, sun-shaped nipple shield, a piece of jewelry worn to accentuate the appearance of a nipple piercing). CBS immediately cut to an aerial view of the stadium, but it had already been broadcast. Many people considered this indecent exposure and a record-breaking two hundred thousand Americans contacted the network to complain, saying it was inappropriate in the context of a football game.

Jackson and Timberlake stated that the exposure was an accident. Viacom (through both CBS and MTV) the National Football League, Jackson, Timberlake and halftime show sponsor America Online had since all apologized for the incident, dubbed "Nipplegate" by some observers. (AOL would later be refunded States Dollar|US$" target="_blank" >^*10 million by the NFL.) Jackson later admitted the stunt was devised beforehand, but "went further than she planned". According to her spokeswoman, a red lace bra was supposed to remain when Timberlake tore off the outer covering. Timberlake blamed the incident on a "wardrobe malfunction". Because of this incident "Janet Jackson" became the most looked-for term in 2004 for many search engines. ^* However, in a future interview, Timberlake also made a statement saying that he "loved giving ya'll something to talk about."

Subsequently, the NFL announced that MTV, who also produced the halftime show for Super Bowl XXXV, would never be involved in another halftime show. Besides Jackson's accidental exposure, the show featured numerous dancers (alongside rappers Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was nicknamed "P. Diddy" at that time and Nelly) along with other participants in costumes, such as Kid Rock wearing an American flag with holes for the sleeves and collar, which many viewers felt were inappropriate for a sporting event. The theme of the halftime show was intended to promote MTV's Rock the Vote campaign to encourage younger people to get out and vote, but this message was lost in the ensuing controversy, the loose connection between all the acts of the halftime show and the actions that ensued throughout the show. On February 4, Terri Carlin launched a class action lawsuit against Jackson and Timberlake on behalf of "all American citizens who watched the outrageous conduct". The lawsuit alleged that the halftime show contained "sexually explicit acts solely designed to garner publicity and, ultimately, to increase profits for themselves". The lawsuit sought "maximum" punitive and compensatory damages from the performers. Ms. Carlin would later drop the lawsuit.

The incident triggered a rash of fines that the Federal Communications Commission levied soon after the Super Bowl. Clear Channel Communications removed shock jock Howard Stern from several of its large-market radio stations within a month of the incident, citing the raunchy content of Stern's show. The FCC fined Clear Channel after a Florida-based radio show featuring Bubba the Love Sponge was charged with indecency. In September 2004, the FCC fined Viacom the maximum $27,500 penalty for each of the twenty CBS-owned television stations (including satellites of WFRV, WCCO, and KUTV, note that current CBS O&O KOVR in Sacramento at the time was owned by Sinclair) for a total $550,000 fine, the largest ever against a television broadcaster at that time.

The United States House of Representatives passed a bill, soon after the Super Bowl, to raise the maximum FCC fine penalty from USD $27,500 to $500,000 per violation. The United States Senate voted to increase it to $275,000 per incident, with a cap of $3 million per day. The two houses reconciled the differences in fine levels, settling for a fine of $375,000 per violation in 2005.

In November 2004, Viacom paid out $3.5 million to settle outstanding indecency complaints, but still refused that it was challenging the $550,000 penalty related to the incident. As a result of the incident, some networks established regulations requiring time delays of as much as five minutes for live broadcasts such as awards shows and sporting events.

The Streaker

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Moments after the Jackson-Timberlake tangle, famous streaker Mark Roberts added to the controversial halftime by running around the field nearly-naked except for some writing on his body which read "SUPER BOWEL" on the front, an advertisement for online betting website goldenpalace.com and a well-placed G-string. Roberts' stunt was not seen on-air in the USA however, as CBS chose to keep its cameras in a wide-shot view of the stadium as Roberts ran around the field until players from both the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers tackled him, and cameras showed him being forcibly escorted from the field at Reliant Stadium. Matt Chatham, special teams expert and reserve linebacker for New England initially knocked Roberts down, allowing the police to expel him from the stadium. In a joking reference to that incident, game announcers Greg Gumbel and Phil Simms would say that the game would feature "raw, naked football".

Other controversies

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The Super Bowl broadcast featured numerous commercials for erectile dysfunction medicines and beer advertisements with flatulating horses and dogs attacking male genitalia. In a league-mandated policy meant to clear the airwaves of such advertisements, with the exception of the erection pills, the NFL announced that those types of commercials would not air again during Super Bowl broadcasts. In January 2005, Fox, the network that carried Super Bowl XXXIX under the alternating network contract, rejected an advertisement for a cold remedy called Airborne that briefly featured the naked backside of veteran actor Mickey Rooney. One year later, the league announced that it would no longer have an official erectile dysfunction medicine sponsor and would in effect, ban erectile dysfunction ads.

In Canada, where the show was broadcast by Global, the incident passed largely without controversy: only about 50 Canadianscomplained about the incident to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC). CBSC received roughly twice as many complaints about other aspects of the Super Bowl broadcast, including music and advertising issues.[http://www.cbsc.ca/english/cbscdocs/annreports/CBSC_Annual_Report_2003-2004.pdf

Prior to the unexpected halftime show mishap, CBS rejected both MoveonPac's ad "Bush in 30 Seconds" and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ad because it was deemed too 'controversial' which lead to the debate of censorship on CNN.

Aftermath

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Some have speculated that the fallout from this incident may have had a ripple effect on daytime television. These television shows are known for "love in the afternoon" and regularly feature romantic couplings; shortly before the Super Bowl, the Procter & Gamble soap operas As the World Turns and Guiding Light had gone as far as featuring rear male nudity during lovemaking scenes. After the Super Bowl controversy, FCC commissioner Michael J. Copps stated that it was time for a crackdown on daytime television and indicated that he was reviewing whether soap operas were violating the agency's indecency prohibitions.

Some riots near CBS affiliates were done by Fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims in various cities in the United States -- many of then were linked to Nipplegate.

Following these announcements, Guiding Light edited out nudity from an episode that had already been taped. A week later, the show's executive producer John Conboy was fired and replaced by Ellen Wheeler. All nine American network soaps began to impose an unwritten rule of avoiding any sort of risqué adult scenes, and in the months following, soap opera periodical Soap Opera Digest editors wrote about how daytime television was losing its steam. ^*

Nighttime television was not spared the fallout from the Jackson incident, either. For example, an episode of Enterprise entitled "Harbinger", originally included a brief shot of a character's buttocks, but this scene was censored when UPN—itself owned by CBS—aired the episode a few weeks after the Super Bowl event, while Canadian broadcasts of the episode were uncensored. The NBC drama ER also re-edited a scene in an episode two weeks after the incident where paramedics were wheeling an elderly woman into the hospital, and her breast could be seen non-explicitly in the context of her injury and treatment. The media gave much attention to this editing due to ER's standing as the network's top drama.

Two weeks after the controversy, NASCAR reacted with a stern warning to Busch Series and Nextel Cup Series drivers at the drivers' meeting at their respective races in Rockingham, North Carolina, which later was given to Craftsman Truck Series drivers in Hampton, Georgia two weeks afterwards at their next race, saying in addition to fines, point penalties to driver and team would be assessed for obscenities on air. NASCAR President Mike Helton gave the following warnings to competitors:

"When being interviewed, please understand you are talking to an audience from 8 to 80. You have a greater responsibility than we've ever had before."

"(The Super Bowl XXXVIII) incident led the FCC and the federal government to react. There's now a greater scrutiny on the sports industry. Be sure to understand that (cursing) is detrimental and is under as great a scrutiny as its ever been."

A week later, Busch Series driver Johnny Sauter drew a $10,000 fine and a 25-point penalty for using an obscenity during a radio interview at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway after the Sam's Town 300. In June, Ron Hornaday was fined the same for another radio interview during the MBNA 200 at Dover International Speedway.

The controversy resumed in October when, during an NBC interview, Dale Earnhardt Jr. told Matt Yocum, who had asked Earnhardt about the meaning of his third consecutive EA Sports 500 win what it meant, in comparison to his father's ten wins at Talladega Superspeedway, "That don't mean shit". Producers turned the broadcast immediately to play-by-play announcer Bill Weber, who substituted for an injured Allen Bestwick, who apologized for the mistake.

NASCAR didn't budge, and slapped Earnhardt the same penalty, which took him out of the lead in the chase for the Nextel Cup playoff, a setback from which he never recovered.

A three-member panel of the National Stock Car Racing Commission of Chairman George Silbermann, former CBS executive David Hall, who headed the network's cable operations in Nashville from 1997 until 2000 (general manager of The Nashville Network and Country Music Television), and former NBA player Brad Daugherty (who once co-owned a Craftsman Truck Series team) heard the appeal, and upheld the penalty, stating Mr. Earnhardt had violated the warning and was supposed to be a role model.

In 2005, NASCAR threw the same penalty on two Busch Series drivers for using an obscene gesture, and another on a Nextel Cup driver for obscene language. (A second Nextel Cup driver's penalty was overturned when evidence on video showed no obscene gesture.)

NASCAR has continued the language crackdown, imposing time and lap penalties for in-race obscenities heard on team radios, such as Martin Truex Jr being parked from the Food City 500 when his crew chief, Kevin Manion, used the S obscenity, which was heard on the Fox television broadcast.

In apparent reaction to the controversy, the next two Super Bowls featured halftime performances by older acts—Paul McCartney (XXXIX) and the Rolling Stones (XL). McCartney's performance was uncontroversial; the Rolling Stones' aired with a five-second delay, and the NFL briefly muted Mick Jagger's vocals on the songs Start Me Up and Rough Justice.

The Controversy as a Reflection of Values

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After the incident, while many people were upset by it, others complained that too many people were upset by it. The widespread controversy possibly reflects the state of sexual ideas as taboo in the United States. While some people complained that "my kids were watching," others pointed out that if parents allow their children to watch an intense contact sport like football (which often features violent collisions and tackles), then a single naked breast should be a relatively trivial issue. Frequently a comparison is made between the financial fallout of wardrobe malfunction incident (~$500,000) and the fines paid by the owners of the Sago mine in the year leading up to the Sago Mine Disaster (about $24,000). As some people pointed, the controversy helped the government to endure censorship on network television. To many non-Americans, especially Europeans, the incident's fallout solidified the continuing stereotype of US citizens as ironically and puritanically uptight (and prone to over-reaction over trivial things), even compared to the English.

Parody

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• The incident was parodied by singer Alanis Morissette at the Juno Awards of 2004.
• The Bob Rivers Show parodied the event in the song "Janet's Coconut"
• In D12's music video "My Band", the event is re-enacted as a parody, with Bizarre as Jackson, and Eminem as Timberlake, and also in the form of puppets in Eminem's music video of "Ass Like That".
• The website Request-a-Song ^* recorded and released "I saw Janet Jackson's Boob," which is one of the most popular songs on that site.
• Singer Eric West made media headlines when he wore a I Support Janet Jackson T-shirt to the 2004 MTV Video Music Awards. West told Teen People magazine, "It was my way of showing Janet support after being blacklisted by so many media outlets".
• Jackson also made fun of herself in a 2004 Saturday Night Live appearance, first while playing Condoleezza Rice, nervously answering a question by exposing her right breast, then by viewing a mock "home video" from her childhood when her bathing suit top came off in a wading pool. NBC affiliate WLBZ and WCSH in Bangor and Portland, Maine ended up cutting off the broadcast for fear of a repeat of the infamous incident.
• Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser light beer brand (called "Bud Light") poked fun at the incident in a commercial that was not chosen to air during Super Bowl XXXIX, but rather made available for viewing from their website, in which a stagehand supposedly used Ms. Jackson's bustier to open a bottle of beer, and then uses a piece of tape to repair the damage.
• South Park took aim at the hysteria in its eighth season premiere, "Good Times With Weapons", on March 17, 2004, when Eric Cartman snuck across a stage in the nude and later blamed the incident on a "wardrobe malfunction". In typical South Park fashion the scene was a great illustration of satire and depicted the American culture's selective outrage. The townspeople are angry at Cartman's display, rather than a concern for a horribly mutilated and disoriented character (Butters) who was also present on stage. Referencing the acceptance of violence and the taboo of sexual references.
• A commercial for Burger King ^* included two male office workers fighting over a Burger King sandwich, with one worker's shirt being ripped open to reveal a nipple shield similar to Jackson's.
• Richard Thompson wrote and performed a song, "Dear Janet Jackson", mocking the use of her breasts at the Super Bowl.
• The Onion, a parody newspaper, ran as its headline article for January 26, 2005, U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV. The article's satirical target was the nation's over-reaction to the incident, rather than the incident itself.
• In a Super Bowl XXXIX commercial for Go Daddy a comely young lady (portrayed by WWE Diva Candice Michelle) who was making a statement before an advertising committee continues to have the right strap of her tank top fall while she is demonstrating how she would be performing in front of the committee (strangely enough, the dance that she was doing would become part of her wrestling gimmick that she uses on the WWE roster); the original commercial included the phrase "wardrobe malfunction", but the words were cut after FCC complaints. Oddly enough, this stirred a bit of its own controversy when a scheduled second airing of the ad and a ten-second plug that was scheduled to be aired at the two minute warning of the fourth quarter were pulled by Fox, who broadcast the game, out of fear that the NFL would have objected about the content of the commercial. Go Daddy received a refund, as well as an apology from both Fox and the NFL several weeks later. They have aired a new ad with Michelle cleaning an office window in a rather sensuous way during Fox's 2005 NFL Playoff broadcasts, and planned a new ad to debut during Super Bowl XL, provided it clears ABC's Standards and Practices officials; however, ABC did not clear the entire ad. Instead, a tamer version aired on game day, with viewers being told to visit the company's website to see the ad in its entirety. The commercial also aired on USA Network the next night as part of RAW, on which Michelle regularly appears.
• The Simpsons episode "Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass", which aired after Super Bowl XXXIX (except in Philadelphia and Boston, the cities of two teams that played in that game, where it aired an hour following the actual game telecast's conclusion) features Homer and Ned making a Super Bowl halftime show that shocks the nation (but not because of nudity). A promo for this episode replaced the second airing of the aforementioned Go Daddy ad.
• An episode of Family Guy deals with the aftermath of the "David Hyde Pierce Incident", in which the actor inadvertently reveals his testicles at the Emmy Awards. During the end of the musical number in the episode, several freeze frame images are included with the characters doing tasteless things. One frame includes an animated Justin Timberlake and Peter Griffin recreating the wardrobe malfunction. Peter is wearing Janet Jackson's outfit from the halftime incident.
• An episode of The Now Show featured a song on the subject.
• The manga Othello features a reference to the incident when something similar happens.
• In the Danny Phantom TV movie "Reality Trip", Danny, Sam, and Tucker try to prevent Freakshow from controlling reality by hiding three of the four Reality Gems from the Reality Gauntlet somewhere. However, in doing so, while Freakshow controls its powers, it creates an explosion that causes Danny to temporarily lose ghost powers and fall into a Dumpty Humpty concert near Casper High, where (all in a reference to the incident) he reverts to human form in front of audiences, both live and televised, shocking the whole world and getting mixed reviews, some with outrage (Danny, Sam, and Tucker's families and the Guys in White, and the audience at first), others in amazement (Dash and Paulina). Danny (and Jazz) denies the incident, saying, "Um, no one saw that, right?" while Sam and Tucker defend him from the incident. (This is the second time a show referencing the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime incident aired, without the nudity, of course.)

Issues in the culture wars | Janet Jackson | Moral panics | Nudity | Obscenity controversies | Super Bowl XXXVIII | Controversies | Sports-related flops | Breast | Censorship in the United States | Memorable moments in sports

Nipplegate | Scandale du Nipplegate | Escândalo do Super Bowl XXXVIII